Grenade!!

Top of the evening to all…

Please forgive the attention-grabbing title and the slightly morbid beginning to this blog entry.

The kill radius of a standard grenade is five metres.  The injury radius is 15 metres.  Why do I tell you this?  I tell you this because we have all just been witness to a grenade explosion.

Last week, two lawyers in Ontario filed a class-action lawsuit against Ashley Madison, the website devoted to helping people have an affair.  The lawsuit is for $578,000,000.  The news reports today that there have been two suicides possibly connected with the mass hacking and release of data from that company.  There will be other lawsuits.  There will be broken homes and broken families.  This grenade has killed people, and it will seriously injure others.

My sympathies for all of the active parties are quite limited.  You all know that I regard adultery as abuse.  No company should market marital abuse as a commodity.  That Ashley Madison will likely have to close down shop over this is frankly a benefit to marriage and to society as a whole.  My sympathies for the customers are also limited.  They tried to do something despicable and keep it secret.  They should realize and remember my mother’s sage advice: it takes two people to keep a secret.  If my sympathies for those two groups are limited, my sympathies for the hackers are non-existent.  They have invaded the private lives of many people with the sole purpose of committing crime – extortion, blackmail.  These people are beneath contempt.  They are cowards.  They hide behind computer screens and destroy people.

I have never been able to put into words the difference between sex and intimacy.  I have come close.  Last year, Jennifer did something to her back.  The result was that for about a month, she had to sleep downstairs until we replaced our mattress.  It was torture for both of us, even though I moved downstairs also.  I realized that much of the contact that takes place in a bed is not specifically sexual.  The need for that non-sexual contact is at least part of where I define intimacy.

There is more to the definition than just that contact though.  I say this because the sense of betrayal is far more acute and palpable when there has been a sexual violation of a marriage.  If sex were only a physical activity, to change a partner should really be no different from any other physical activity.  “Honey, I have a new racquetball partner.”  Who cares?!  But that this type of betrayal leads to broken marriages and shortened lives states clearly that (marital) sex is far more than just a physical endeavour.  Bringing someone else into the picture is not at all the same thing as a new racquetball partner.

This grenade has not yet completed its explosion.  There will be more death.  There will be more dishonour.  All I can do is again remind you that there is nothing that can happen with an affair that cannot happen with one’s own spouse.  And the beauty of it is that there is no grenade.  No one’s life will be wrecked.  In fact, the opposite will likely happen.  Lives will be made better.

Good night my friends.

R/SCG